


this is not what they thought purgatory would be

by Wiz_is_bored



Category: Hatchetfield Universe - Team StarKid, Horrible Histories, The Guy Who Didn't Like Musicals - Team StarKid
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon, paul and emma are in purgatory, probably the best idea ive ever had tbh
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-28
Updated: 2020-08-05
Packaged: 2021-03-06 08:00:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,454
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25579984
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wiz_is_bored/pseuds/Wiz_is_bored
Summary: paul and emmas deaths were kind of stupid when you think about it
Relationships: Paul Matthews & Emma Perkins
Comments: 23
Kudos: 38





	1. the waiting room

**Author's Note:**

> truly this is the best idea ive ever had nothing can compare

Everything is dark. Dark and cold. Dark and cold and empty. Emma floats in this seemingly unending void, vaguely aware of the fact that she is, in fact, dead. After a few years (or maybe seconds, it’s not clear) of floating, a thought finally pops into her head. She should open her eyes. So she does.

With newly open eyes she finds herself in a similarly dark and unending place, but not quite as cold and empty. There’s a floor, for one thing. Clusters of candles illuminate rows upon rows of chairs. The people seated here seem to be in a similar state of post-mortem to Emma, if the blood and sores and various weapons sticking out of various wounds are anything to go by. She herself, to her disdain, has a fair amount of sticky, thick, blue residue around her mouth. It doesn’t taste of anything anymore, thank God. Shutting her eyes again, she rubs at her face, trying to wrap her head around everything.

“Emma?”

The dead woman looks around at the sound of a familiar voice, to find a familiar dead man sitting beside her. Paul. The real Paul, she’s strangely certain of it. He gives a small, awkward smile, raising his hand in a little wave. “Hi.”

“Uh, hey,” she responds, returning the gesture, still thoroughly confused. “Where… Where are we?”

“I’m not sure, to be honest. Purgatory, maybe? Limbo? I just know that we’re waiting.”

“How long have you been here?”

The man stares out across the room, thinking. “A few hours. Or it might have been a decade, I’m not sure. Time works strangely in here.”

Emma nods. She’s already unsure if it’s been minutes or centuries. Looking around her again she notices something new: everyone waiting has a rectangular card pinned to their chest, bearing a circular red symbol and four numbers. In the chair to her right, a military man is labeled ‘1914’. Looking back around, she sees that Paul bears the number ‘2018’.

“Where did you get the…?” she asks, pointing.

“Under the chair.”

She fishes it out. 2018. With time rapidly losing its meaning, it takes a moment (or maybe it doesn’t, who knows?) for her to realise that it’s a date. 2018, the year in which she died. There’s no pin, but the card adheres itself to her shirt of its own accord.

A gentle hand brushes hers. Taking it, she locks eyes with Paul again. He’s scared. They both are.

“What are we waiting for?” she asks quietly.

“Well. For a while, I…” He smiles nervously, looking away. “I think I was waiting for you, actually. But now I have no idea. A few times I’ve heard someone calling ‘next’, and someone leaves, but I don’t know where they go.”

For the third time she casts her eyes around, but this time she’s searching for something in particular; something she doesn’t find.

“I guess you just know when it’s your turn, huh.”

“I assume so.”

An undocumentable amount of time passes.

“Do you believe in Heaven?” Paul asks eventually.

“I- I don’t know. But I don’t think… I don’t know if I’d make it there, if it exists.”

Paul lifts his hand to her cheek, gently turning her head to face him, his eyes full of concern. “Emma, what are you talking about? Of course you would.”

“You can’t say that, Paul, you barely know me. I’m kinda an asshole.”

“Honestly? Me too. But we tried to save the world, didn’t we? We tried, you told me to destroy the meteor and I  _ tried.  _ That’s got to count for something, right?”

Emma looks away, staring at the floor. “I abandoned my family,” she mutters.

“I shut people out too,” Paul says quietly, “there’s so many times I could have been kind, and I just… wasn’t.”

The pair shuffle a little closer together.

“Does one day of trying the hardest we could outweigh years of not trying at all?” Emma wonders aloud. Paul squeezes her hand.

“I damn hope so.”

He doesn’t ask if she believes in Hell.

They might have slipped into an uneasy silence lasting millenia - or milliseconds - if it wasn’t for the jolly tune that suddenly fills the air.

“What the-” Emma begins, but her attention is taken by a man that seems to be dancing up the row of chairs. No, not just a man. Her stomach drops as she realises that the figure is, in fact, a living skeleton, wrapped in black robes with long, silver-blond hair flowing behind it. It seems to be in a fantastic mood, singing to itself as it makes its way along the row.

_ “Stupid deaths, stupid deaths, they’re funny ‘cause they’re true! Woo! _

_ Stupid deaths, stupid deaths, hope next time it’s not you! Hoo hoo!” _

The skeleton sighs happily. “I love my job,” it says to itself as it passes under a crossed pair of scythes and disappears, “I do!”

Paul and Emma simply stare.

“Okay what the actual FUCK?” Emma eventually exclaims.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> shoutout to my friend who completely blanked on the stupid deaths bit in horrible histories so, when i described this scene, thought i had randomly come up with the idea of death singing a song about stupidity and did not question it as it sounded like the kind of insanity i come up with normally
> 
> thanks for reading! :)


	2. The Interview

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> oh you already know whats going on

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you so much for all the kind comments on the last chapter! time for some more bullshit :)

Paul and Emma have been sitting in the waiting room for minutes or years or millenia or maybe even eons. No amount of time would be long enough to wrap their heads around what they just saw. Emma wonders whether they’ve been sent to musical hell for failing to stop the musical apocalypse. Paul wonders if he somehow caused this by saying being trapped in a musical was his personal hell. But there’s nothing they can do to answer these questions.

So they wait.

And wait.

And  _ wait. _

Paul taps his foot impatiently as he stares up at the void. Beside him Emma has fallen asleep on his shoulder. He’s unsure of the logistics of being asleep and dead simultaneously, though she seems to be managing it.

After a brief, indescribably long nap the dead woman’s eyes snap open. “We’re next,” she mutters. “It’s our turn next.”

Paul nods. “Yeah. Yeah, of course it is.” It feels like this information was in the back of his mind and he’s just now been reminded of it, though he has no idea when or how he could have learnt it. Sitting up and rubbing at her eyes, Emma notes how the blue shit around her mouth seems determined to stay there, not even leaving a trace on Paul’s shirt. If she’s stuck for all eternity with that mess on her face while Paul has managed to retain a fucking grenade belt she’s going to be pissed.

“You nervous?” the man asks.

“Yeah. And confused. Deeply confused.”

“Me too. But I’ll tell you one thing: if that  _ thing _ \- I don’t care if it’s the grim reaper or a demonic spirit or an old God - if that thing fucking  _ sings  _ again I’m blowing it to kingdom come.”

“Good plan. Even if it did get you killed the first time.”

And they continue to wait. But the incomprehensible amount of time seems somehow shorter this time.

“Next!”

Together they stand and make their way across the room, under the scythes and into another void. There they find the skeleton again, leaning back in a chair with its feet up on a desk, studying a tattered yet important-looking scroll. Emma gives Paul a look of confusion out of the corner of her eye, considering the possibility that, rather than being dead, she is somehow high on blue alien sludge.

“And you are?” Death asks, not looking up.

“Uh- Paul Matthews.”

“Emma Perkins.”

“Bit generic. But two people means double the stupidity, eh?” He sets the scroll aside and tucks his legs under the desk. “Well, how’d you die, then? No! No, don’t tell me!”

Elbows on the desk, he laces his fingers together and narrows his eyes.

“Don’t know about you,” he says eventually, waving a hand dismissively at Paul, “but  _ you-”  _ he points to Emma-  _ “you  _ look like you ate a bit too much blueberry jam. Did you choke on it? Now that  _ would  _ be stupid! Ha!”

“Well… No…”

“No? Eh, worth a shot. So what happened?”

The pair exchange glances. “This is going to take some explaining,” Emma says.

“Oh, I’m all ears.”

Paul begins their account. “It started when a meteor crashed into the theatre in our town. There was this… Pathogen, I guess? A virus? Anyway, it was in the meteor. It killed people, but then it brought them back to life. Except it didn’t, not really, they were still dead but now they were singing and dancing and-”

“Zombies,” Emma clarifies. “It was musical zombies.”

The skeleton somehow raises its brow. “Go on.”

“There was this big musical number while I was trying to get to work, and then my boss started singing, asking what I wanted. And I don’t like musicals, so I was very confused and concerned-”

“He was borderline hysterical, actually.”

“-and I went to get coffee, and Emma worked at the coffee shop, but people were singing there too.”

“My colleagues were all infected, they were poisoning people-”

“And then you died!”

Eyes wide and full of glee, Death waits to be told he’s correct.

“No, actually,” Paul says slowly, “we ran, and we ended up in this alley where we met up with my friends from work. Charlotte, Bill, Te-”

“But they all died.”

Paul looks over at his companion, slightly startled. She shrugs. “We’re telling him how  _ we  _ died, right? We need to summarise the rest.” She turns back to face the desk. “Long story short, we split up. Me and my biology professor figured out that the infection was spread by this blue shit-” she indicates to her face- “and the meteor was the ‘brain’ of the hivemind. Paul met some army guy who told him there’d be a rescue helicopter at 11. We met up again but we were the only survivors in the town at that point. We got to the helicopter and almost got out of town - the town was on an island - but it turns out the pilot was a fucking musical zombie. There was a crash.”

“And  _ then  _ you died!”

“No. Well, almost-”

“I  _ told  _ you to put on your seatbelt!”

“Paul was fine, but I ended up with a metal bar through my leg.”

Death is on the edge of his seat, grinning as if this is the best story he’s ever heard. “So you’re stuck on an island of  _ musical zombies,  _ and one of you can’t walk. Then what?”

“I told Paul about the meteor being the brain,” Emma explains, “he found a belt of grenades in the crash and he went to go destroy it.”

“Well then, Paul, how did that go?”

The man hesitates slightly with two pairs of dead eyes on him. “I went to the theatre and found the meteor but the place was  _ crawling  _ with infected people.”

“And…?”

“And… Before me and Emma split up the first time I told her I was never going to be in a fucking musical, but the air in the theatre was full of spores from the virus, and…” He sighs, looking down at his feet. “And I ended up performing a full-blown musical number before I blew up the meteor and myself.”

Death is silent for a moment, mouth hanging open in a huge grin, eyes wide. “You- you actually- HA!” He slaps his desk, laughing until his bones rattle. Paul turns bright red. “You said- you told her you’d never be in a musical?”

“Yes.”

“And then you died performing a musical number?”

“I- yeah, I did.”

“Brilliant! Now,  _ that  _ is stupid!”

Neither Paul nor Emma know how to respond to that, instead standing in confused silence, waiting for Death to regain his composure.

“Alright, alright,” he says eventually, “so that’s Paul. What about you?”

Emma takes a deep breath. “I’m sorry about you having to sing, Paul,” she says. “You’re  _ really  _ not going to like this story.”

Immediately the colour drains from the dead man’s face. “Why not?”

But before Emma can answer, the skeleton interrupts.

“Wait. You don’t know how she died.”

“No, I don’t, I was already-”

Death’s excitement seems to have reached a new height. “Oh, you have to come and listen with me! Come on, come here!”

“Um, ok…”

Paul hesitantly joins him behind the desk, eyes wide and perplexed.

“Come on, sit down!”

There is no extra chair. Paul settles for kneeling.

“Alright then!” Death turns to the dead woman. “Emma, how did you die?”

Before she begins to talk Emma gives Paul an apologetic look. He’s  _ really  _ not going to like this.

“I was found by soldiers and taken to a hospital in the next town over. They patched up my leg and were going to send me to Colorado and give me a new identity as part of covering up the whole musical zombie thing. I had just been discharged from hospital and they said some guy called Ben Bridges was going to take me to Colorado. But that was a fake name, of course, he was actually… he was actually Paul.”

Death narrows his eyes. “But he…” His eyes widen, and the grin returns to his face. “Oh.  _ Oh.  _ This is going to be good.” Paul’s mouth is hanging open in a horrified expression.

“Yeah, he was infected. There was another damned musical number, I tried to get away but there were too many of them. They were just fucking with me, pushing me around, singing and dancing.”

“Oh Emma,” Paul says quietly, close to tears.

“Shh! It’s getting good!” Death chastises him.

“It was the Paul-zombie that did it,” Emma continues. “He, uh…” She fixes her gaze above Paul and Death’s heads, sighing. “You know the blue shit?” She indicates her face again. “I choked on it. I choked on it and I died.”

The skeleton cocks his head to the side, narrowing his eyes. “Hang on, we’re missing something here. How did it get in your mouth?”

“Well. He… Some of the others held me down and uh... and the bastard threw up in my mouth.”

Both Paul and Death are speechless for a moment.

“You choked on vomit?!”

“Yeah.”

“You actually choked on vomit?”

“Yes. I did.”

Paul and Emma watch him laugh, just as confused as ever.

“Choked on vomit, fantastic. You’re through to the afterlife!”

“Oh,” Paul says to himself, “is that what we were trying to do?”

“Yes, now get out of here, go on. No need to make a song and dance about it! Ha!”

Paul leaves Death to laugh at his own joke and joins Emma, heading in the direction the skeleton points to.

“That was odd,” he says under his breath.

“Yeah, you can say that again.”

And with a pop, they leave the void.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> first time ive finished a multi-chapter fic! yeah it was only 2 chapters but im counting it as a win.
> 
> thanks so much for reading! :)


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